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Industry:
B2B
Location:
Europe (UK and France)
http://marinsoftware.com
  • 226% increase in leads
  • 43% decrease in CPA
  • Expansion into three new markets

About Marin Software

Marin Software’s mission is to give advertisers the power to drive higher efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency in their paid marketing programs that run on the world’s largest publishers. Marin provides industry-leading enterprise marketing software for advertisers and agencies to measure, manage, and optimize more than $7.8 billion in annualized ad spend across the web and mobile devices. Offering an integrated SaaS ad management platform for search, social, and display advertising, Marin helps digital marketers improve financial performance, save time, and make better decisions.

It’s always a challenge to find the perfect tradeoff between quantity and quality of B2B leads while strictly managing our budget. Our marketing peers are extremely busy, but using our own technology, we were able to reach them and provide them with a potential solution to manage their online advertising campaigns more efficiently.

Julia Demydova
Social Media Consultant at Marin Software

The Challenges of B2B Marketing

With unceasingly restricted time and budget, digital marketers are always searching for new and better ways to do business. Catching and holding their own attention requires not only relevant content, but also creative and effective online marketing approaches.

The Fertile Ground of Lookalike Targeting

To address the question of how to classify keywords, the brand tested a new approach called Marin ScoreCard. This offering from Marin allows the advertiser to define the variables important to their program, and then makes decisions based on those inputs. In this case, the key performance indicator was historical performance data. Here’s a quick snapshot of the metadata that ScoreCard produced:

Since we already had the Facebook pixel installed and had been using it for some time, we took advantage of Facebook’s powerful lookalike technology to target users who downloaded a Marin white paper in the last 180 days. From here, we launched a 1% lookalike campaign.

In a field of over a billion Facebook users, how do you connect with decision-makers interested in your product without breaking the bank? Plant a good seed, nurture it, and reap the results.

We saw positive results right away. So, we applied a nested lookalike technique and launched a 2% lookalike campaign, followed by the lookalike on fans, lookalike on Website Custom Audiences (site visitors), and retargeting on Website Custom Audiences. We used smart exclusions for each campaign to avoid audience overlap, and to preserve budget through excluding people who downloaded a white paper recently or visited the careers section of our website.

Optimizing for the Weekend

Although B2B activities tend to subside during the weekend, the data revealed that there were a small number of high-intent workaholics to engage during this timeframe—hard to locate, but good to convert into a lead.

For others who were taking the weekend off, Marin’s Managed Rules was a perfect solution that helped us optimize campaigns at a granular level during the weekend. A set of automated optimization rules—activated for the weekend—helped acquire a number of leads at a low CPA, and freed up budget for the following weekdays to bid more aggressively.

When One Plus One Equals Three New Markets

Using the Marin Social platform and its powerful, automated managed rules, combined with Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences, we continuously fine-tuned our B2B lead generation campaigns on Facebook, even during the weekend.

The synergies exceeded expectations and resulted in a whopping 226% increase in the number of leads, and a 43% decrease in CPA. Also, we were able to substantially increase budget for this channel, so that a similar strategy could be used to expand our Facebook campaign portfolio into three new European markets—Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Full results include:

  • 226% increase in leads (a record number)
  • 43% decrease in CPA
  • Expansion into three new markets